Federated learning (FL) presents an effective solution for collaborative model training while maintaining data privacy across decentralized client datasets. However, data quality issues such as noisy labels, missing classes, and imbalanced distributions significantly challenge its effectiveness. This study proposes a federated learning methodology that systematically addresses data quality issues, including noise, class imbalance, and missing labels. The proposed approach systematically enhances data integrity through adaptive noise cleaning, collaborative conditional GAN-based synthetic data generation, and robust federated model training. Experimental evaluations conducted on benchmark datasets (MNIST and Fashion-MNIST) demonstrate significant improvements in federated model performance, particularly macro-F1 Score, under varying noise and class imbalance conditions. Additionally, the proposed framework carefully balances computational feasibility and substantial performance gains, ensuring practicality for resource constrained edge devices while rigorously maintaining data privacy. Our results indicate that this method effectively mitigates common data quality challenges, providing a robust, scalable, and privacy compliant solution suitable for diverse real-world federated learning scenarios.

Imaging and genomic data offer distinct and rich features, and their integration can unveil new insights into the complex landscape of diseases. In this study, we present a novel approach utilizing radiogenomic data including structural MRI images and gene expression data, for Alzheimer's disease detection. Our framework introduces a novel heterogeneous bipartite graph representation learning featuring two distinct node types: genes and images. The network can effectively classify Alzheimer's disease (AD) into three distinct stages:AD, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Cognitive Normal (CN) classes, utilizing a small dataset. Additionally, it identified which genes play a significant role in each of these classification groups. We evaluate the performance of our approach using metrics including classification accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 score. The proposed technique holds potential for extending to radiogenomic-based classification to other diseases.

We introduce the first one-stage Top-$k$ Learning-to-Defer framework, which unifies prediction and deferral by learning a shared score-based model that selects the $k$ most cost-effective entities-labels or experts-per input. While existing one-stage L2D methods are limited to deferring to a single expert, our approach jointly optimizes prediction and deferral across multiple entities through a single end-to-end objective. We define a cost-sensitive loss and derive a novel convex surrogate that is independent of the cardinality parameter $k$, enabling generalization across Top-$k$ regimes without retraining. Our formulation recovers the Top-1 deferral policy of prior score-based methods as a special case, and we prove that our surrogate is both Bayes-consistent and $\mathcal{H}$-consistent under mild assumptions. We further introduce an adaptive variant, Top-$k(x)$, which dynamically selects the number of consulted entities per input to balance predictive accuracy and consultation cost. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and SVHN confirm that our one-stage Top-$k$ method strictly outperforms Top-1 deferral, while Top-$k(x)$ achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs by tailoring allocations to input complexity.

Enterprise networks are growing ever larger with a rapidly expanding attack surface, increasing the volume of security alerts generated from security controls. Security Operations Centre (SOC) analysts triage these alerts to identify malicious activity, but they struggle with alert fatigue due to the overwhelming number of benign alerts. Organisations are turning to managed SOC providers, where the problem is amplified by context switching and limited visibility into business processes. A novel system, named AACT, is introduced that automates SOC workflows by learning from analysts' triage actions on cybersecurity alerts. It accurately predicts triage decisions in real time, allowing benign alerts to be closed automatically and critical ones prioritised. This reduces the SOC queue allowing analysts to focus on the most severe, relevant or ambiguous threats. The system has been trained and evaluated on both real SOC data and an open dataset, obtaining high performance in identifying malicious alerts from benign alerts. Additionally, the system has demonstrated high accuracy in a real SOC environment, reducing alerts shown to analysts by 61% over six months, with a low false negative rate of 1.36% over millions of alerts.

This study underscores the potential of machine learning in stroke risk prediction, addressing key challenges such as class imbalance and feature selection. Our findings highlight the significant role of demographic, clinical, and lifestyle factors, with age, average glucose level, and BMI emerging as key predictors. Notably, the analysis reveals the importance of age-specific models, as the predictive influence of factors shifts across different age groups. In elderly patients (65-80 years), work type and glucose level become more influential, while hypertension and heart disease gain prominence. By achieving high predictive accuracy and identifying im-pactful features, this research supports the development of stroke risk assessment tools with potential integration into clinical decision systems. These tools could assist clinicians in early intervention planning and personalized prevention strategies. However, challenges such as data variability, model interpretability, and deployment in real-world healthcare settings remain. Future research should focus on improving model sensitivity, incorporating diverse datasets, and validating predictions in clinical environments. Advancing these models could enhance early detection strategies, ultimately improving patient outcomes and stroke prevention.

Modern robots face challenges shared by humans, where machines must learn multiple sensorimotor skills and express them adaptively. Equipping robots with a human-like memory of how it feels to do multiple stereotypical movements can make robots more aware of normal operational states and help develop self-preserving safer robots. Associative Skill Memories (ASMs) aim to address this by linking movement primitives to sensory feedback, but existing implementations rely on hard-coded libraries of individual skills. A key unresolved problem is how a single neural network can learn a repertoire of skills while enabling fault detection and context-aware execution. Here we introduce Neural Associative Skill Memories (ASMs), a framework that utilises self-supervised predictive coding for temporal prediction to unify skill learning and expression, using biologically plausible learning rules. Unlike traditional ASMs which require explicit skill selection, Neural ASMs implicitly recognize and express skills through contextual inference, enabling fault detection across learned behaviours without an explicit skill selection mechanism. Compared to recurrent neural networks trained via backpropagation through time, our model achieves comparable qualitative performance in skill memory expression while using local learning rules and predicts a biologically relevant speed-accuracy trade-off during skill memory expression. This work advances the field of neurorobotics by demonstrating how predictive coding principles can model adaptive robot control and human motor preparation. By unifying fault detection, reactive control, skill memorisation and expression into a single energy-based architecture, Neural ASMs contribute to safer robotics and provide a computational lens to study biological sensorimotor learning.

Graph unlearning is a crucial approach for protecting user privacy by erasing the influence of user data on trained graph models. Recent developments in graph unlearning methods have primarily focused on maintaining model prediction performance while removing user information. However, we have observed that when user information is deleted from the model, the prediction distribution across different sensitive groups often changes. Furthermore, graph models are shown to be prone to amplifying biases, making the study of fairness in graph unlearning particularly important. This raises the question: Does graph unlearning actually introduce bias? Our findings indicate that the predictions of post-unlearning models become highly correlated with sensitive attributes, confirming the introduction of bias in the graph unlearning process. To address this issue, we propose a fair graph unlearning method, FGU. To guarantee privacy, FGU trains shard models on partitioned subgraphs, unlearns the requested data from the corresponding subgraphs, and retrains the shard models on the modified subgraphs. To ensure fairness, FGU employs a bi-level debiasing process: it first enables shard-level fairness by incorporating a fairness regularizer in the shard model retraining, and then achieves global-level fairness by aligning all shard models to minimize global disparity. Our experiments demonstrate that FGU achieves superior fairness while maintaining privacy and accuracy. Additionally, FGU is robust to diverse unlearning requests, ensuring fairness and utility performance across various data distributions.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) often suffers from false negatives, which degrades the performance on downstream tasks. The existing methods addressing the false negative issue usually rely on human prior knowledge, still leading GCL to suboptimal results. In this paper, we propose a novel Negative Metric Learning (NML) enhanced GCL (NML-GCL). NML-GCL employs a learn-able Negative Metric Network (NMN) to build a negative metric space, in which false negatives can be distinguished better from true negatives based on their distance to anchor node. To overcome the lack of explicit supervision signals for NML, we propose a joint training scheme with bi-level optimization objective, which implicitly utilizes the self-supervision signals to iteratively optimize the encoder and the negative metric network. The solid theoretical analysis and the extensive experiments conducted on widely used benchmarks verify the superiority of the proposed method.

Deep neural networks excel in medical imaging but remain prone to biases, leading to fairness gaps across demographic groups. We provide the first systematic exploration of Human-AI alignment and fairness in this domain. Our results show that incorporating human insights consistently reduces fairness gaps and enhances out-of-domain generalization, though excessive alignment can introduce performance trade-offs, emphasizing the need for calibrated strategies. These findings highlight Human-AI alignment as a promising approach for developing fair, robust, and generalizable medical AI systems, striking a balance between expert guidance and automated efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/Roypic/Aligner.

Traditional machine learning models often prioritize predictive accuracy, often at the expense of model transparency and interpretability. The lack of transparency makes it difficult for organizations to comply with regulatory requirements and gain stakeholders trust. In this research, we propose a fraud detection framework that combines a stacking ensemble of well-known gradient boosting models: XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost. In addition, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques are used to enhance the transparency and interpretability of the model's decisions. We used SHAP (SHapley Additive Explanations) for feature selection to identify the most important features. Further efforts were made to explain the model's predictions using Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanation (LIME), Partial Dependence Plots (PDP), and Permutation Feature Importance (PFI). The IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection dataset, which includes more than 590,000 real transaction records, was used to evaluate the proposed model. The model achieved a high performance with an accuracy of 99% and an AUC-ROC score of 0.99, outperforming several recent related approaches. These results indicate that combining high prediction accuracy with transparent interpretability is possible and could lead to a more ethical and trustworthy solution in financial fraud detection.